Gustaf John Ramstedt

Ramstedt, Gustaf John 

Born Oct. 22, 1873, in Tam-misaari (Ekenäs); died Nov. 25, 1950, in Helsinki. Finnish linguist.

Ramstedt was a professor at the University of Helsinki from 1917 to 1941. He was one of the founders of the comparative-historical study of the Mongolian languages and a pioneer in comparative-historical Altaic studies. Beginning in 1898, he made a series of expeditions to the Volga region, Mongolia, the Kalmyk steppes, the Kuma region, and the Kushka region. He collected Mongolian, Kalmyk, and Mogul linguistic and folk-loric material, which he published with Turkic and, sometimes, Tunguso-Manchurian parallels. Ramstedt denied a Ural-Altaic genetic kinship, and included Korean and Japanese among the Altaic languages. A full summary of inter-Altaic sound and formal correspondences is provided in his Etymological Research on the Korean Language (vols. 1–2, 1949–53).

WORKS

Grammatika koreiskogo iazyka. Moscow, 1951. (Translated from English.)
Vvedenie v altaiskoe iazykoznanie: Morfologiia. Moscow, 1957. (Translated from German.)
Kalmückisches Wörterbuch. Helsinki, 1935.
Einführung in die altaische Sprachwissenschaft, vols. 1–3. Helsinki, 1952–66.

REFERENCES

Henriksson, K. E. “Sprachwissenschaftliche Veròffentlichungen von Prof. Dr. G. J. Ramstedt. “Studia Orientalia, 1950, vol. 14, no. 12.
Poucha, P. “Gustaf John Ramstedt: Ein Nachruf.” Archiv Orientální, 1951, vol. 19, nos. 3–4.

F. D. ASHNIN